My KFA talk: Basic Gender Theory and Why You Should Care

[rax]

So my goal in giving this talk was to get through a coherent arc explaining gender theory and why you should care in 12 minutes and then have time for discussion. (KFA time slots are 20 minutes long.) I left out roughly a zillion things, which is OK, because that was sort of the point; I also think I actually did a good job, and got people thinking, and sparked interesting discussion, and hopefully encouraged people to do some further reading and/or conversing.

In giving the talk, I set myself the challenge of not using the words "discourse," "problematic," or "deconstruct." Obviously (or at least obviously if you talk to me a lot) this is not because I think those words have no value; I find them important in how I understand the world around me and if anything overuse them. Arguably, though, theorists and genderheads as a whole if anything overuse them, and it's something people have explicitly said turns them off to thinking about theory at all, and so I figured in a basic brief talk, I should avoid them. Another word I've been told is a major turn-off, although I didn't explicitly set out not to use it in this talk, is "oppression;" I've as a result been trying to think twice before using it. Unlike the others, which generally have less loaded (if also less usefully loaded) synonyms, not using "oppression" makes me nervous for calling-a-spade-a-spade issues. I'm torn, and I figure "thinking about it" is the right place for now.

You can watch the presentation video by clicking on this link. I'd embed it but I'm pretty sure LJ won't let me do that due to the recent security issue; just in case, here it is:

Gender Theory and Why You Should Care from maymay on Vimeo.

I'd really love to know what people think. I'd especially love to hear from people about what you think the most important things missing are; I have some thoughts but I want to hear other perspectives before I share them all. A bit of explanation (not that it necessarily negates potential criticism) --- I wasn't sure how to introduce myself because I wanted to avoid using identity labels but also wanted to express that it was worth spending twenty minutes listening to me talk about this topic. In general (and I blame circuit_four in part for this, as well as the whole ##crawl-offtopic gang) I've been trying to hold both "identity affiliations are powerful" and "identity affiliations reinforce things I don't like" in my head at the same time lately. It takes a lot of energy, but they do interesting things when put in the same place; I think that the end of this talk is one of them. If you have suggestions for things I should go read by other people who have been holding those ideas in their head together for much longer than I have, I'd love them; in particular I recently read Covering by Kenji Yoshino (Amazon link) and while he doesn't focus on that duality, he does touch on it. Really, though, that book should be its own post...

Anyway, I'd love criticism, and I'm also in a mood where I could really go for any praise you've got lying around, too. :)

Comments

[rax.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what we do. I think people brains are wired to categorize. I think there are a zillion positive uses for this wiring. Lately I've been trying to see if it's possible just to not quite as much categorize myself. I'd love to hear more answers to this question.

[blushingflower.livejournal.com]

Human beings are in fact, pretty much wired to categorize. It's how we make sense of the world. I think the trick is being willing to let some things be uncategorizable. And also letting our categories be broad, and allowing nouns to be in multiple categories that we don't expect to have overlap. As well as learning to let our categories not have value judgments attached to them. For example, I say that I can judge people based on the way they dress, and I maintain that this is true in the sense that we choose our clothing to send a message about who we are. So, when I was in college, I could frequently tell what your major was likely to be based on your clothes (art, business, engineering/hard sciences, liberal arts). I can frequently tell if you're looking for the BR group by the way you're dressed (the kid in the XKCD shirt? probably ours and not looking for the Georgetown law students who hang out in the same bar. Dude in suit? probably not ours, sadly). That's not a value judgment, that's not "you have a popped collar and are therefore a douchebag", or "you're dressed like an art student and are therefore stupid" (or "a stoner" which isn't necessarily a value judgment but is a case of having categories that are too narrow).


I, personally, don't have a lot of problems with labels, so long as they're ones I give myself, and rather than rejecting labels I've chosen to give myself a really long one ("service-oriented, masochistic, smart-mouthed, submissive, equal-opportunity attention whore"). If forced in the vanilla world to pick an identity I'm newly choosing "queer" partly because I don't like the way that "bisexual" presupposes the existence of only two genders (or conflates gender and sex), partly because power dynamics are inherent to the way I approach relationships more than gender, and partly because it's a political identity, but I think "equal-opportunity" suits me better outside of the political identity aspect. (not that anyone ever asks) But I have friends who pick "queer" because it's a way to avoid any more specific label. But I've always been good at multiple choice questions and choosing the answer that best fits, even if it's not the right answer.